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Comment by otakucode | Hacker News Reader

Whatever the cause, it has to be something extremely subtle and very unlikely to occur. We know that from the simple numbers. Tens of millions of people vaping on an hourly basis for years amounting to ~500 cases means that whatever is occurring is a freak occurrence and not some direct consequence that has a high likelihood of occurring in typical people.

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And isn't one of the common threads within this whole thing the presence of Vitamin E acetate within the oil?

Earlier reports were suggesting that contaminated oils may be part of the cause, which could explain why all these cases are hitting at once. Not sure on the process of making these oils, but I could see new methods being introduced causing unforeseen side affects.

The initial NY report mentioned also that they were likely counterfeit products, which I could easily see as being prone to use an unsafe substitution.

> Tens of millions of people vaping on an hourly basis for years amounting to ~500 cases

Vaping is new.

Maybe these are the early incidents of a yet-to-be-discovered chronic condition that takes a decade plus of vaping to develop.

Hey, millions of high schoolers smoke cigarettes and none of them have lung cancer! (yet)

18 and 19 year olds are in commas, dead right now, or will be soon. This is killing people far faster than cigarettes. I'm of the opinion the small fraction of people claiming they only smoked nicotine are probably lying for reasons mentioned before. They are young kids who don't want to disappoint their families with the fact that they are now dying at a very young age from what used to be a mostly harmless activity (marijuana smoking). There are also settlements and insurance including life insurance, AD & D to consider as well.

Juul Lab's and all the vaping shops need to be put out of business for claiming this is a harmless way of smoking. Kids took that and ran with it as they vaporize God knows what to get high in a stealthy and supposedly, more healthy way.

>18 and 19 year olds are in commas

Oh no, not commas! What other punctuation related illnesses hover over our head, waiting to descend when the clouds of vape smoke clear?

Missed periods?

Or, even worse, colon cancer. (A terrible affliction that can leave one with a semi-colon.)

(I'll get downvoted... like you... we will go down together.)

Wait, so in your first paragraph, you acknowledge the likeliness that the afflicted is almost certainly from contaminated THC cartridges.

But in the second paragraph, you say that Juul -- a legal company that produces NICOTINE cartridges, not THC -- should be shut down.

How does A lead to B here?

> 18 and 19 year olds are in commas, dead right now, or will be soon. This is killing people far faster than cigarettes.

According to the article, 5 people have died due to this vaping related illness. By contrast, cigarette smoking kills 480,000 people a year in the US: https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/heal...

And this is a more or less useless comparison. Juul has only existed at all for about 4 years. Smoking kills huge numbers of people, but not in 4 years.

AFAIK, the data is consistent with vaping being more dangerous than smoking.

For what it’s worth, humans evolved in the presence of fire. Plant smoke, while quite dangerous, is something that mammal lungs have dealt with, in moderation, forever. Whatever chemical soup is present in vaping vapor is new. And saying “it’s just glycerol” makes no sense. Glycerol has very small vapor pressure at body temperature and boils well above the boiling point of water. Some websites suggest that the actual output from vaping is quite nasty indeed.

> Whatever the cause, it has to be something extremely subtle and very unlikely to occur.

We don't know that, or not with the interpretation I think you're making. I mean, the correlation here between vaping and lipoid pneumonia is objectively much stronger than it is between smoking and lung cancer after a similar amount of use.

I guess most epidemiologists would go with you and bet that this is "probably" not as bad, long term. But given the evidence at hand that's still a pretty significant risk.

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